At serious risk of cancellation due to their bottom-pinching and wolf-whistling, the Carry On films are rather defended as social history in The Carry On Girls by Gemma and Robert Ross.
Ronnie Knight has died at the age of 89 after battling with Parkinson s disease over the last few years. The former nightclub owner was married three times before his death, but who were his ex-wives?
A good bird: remembering Barbara Windsor
A very British icon of both the normal and extraordinary, Dame Barbara Windsor was always in control of her own image.
31 December 2020
Barbara Windsor
“She was a good bird.” Such is the obituary Barbara Windsor requested for herself while appearing on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories ten years ago.
Like everything about her, it is deceptively simple, another way of saying – there’s nothing to me, I’m just like you, what you see is what you get. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Windsor was extraordinary and deeply unusual – a one-off who came to embody British popular culture in the twentieth century like nobody else. When she took part in the BBC’s flagship Desert Island Discs in 1990, she chose as her luxury item a Union Jack, which she promised to wave, alone on the beach, while listening to Land of Hope and Glory.
From Carry On to EastEnders, we pay tribute to national treasure and showbiz royalty, Barbara Windsor.
11 December 2020
Sparrows Can t Sing (1963)
Barbara Windsor, who has died at the age of 83, had a long reign. She changed her surname from Deeks around the time of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953 and withdrew from public gaze on leaving the Queen Vic for the last time in 2016. In between times, ‘Babs’ became a national treasure, although she is bound to be remembered for the wrong reasons, as there was much more to her than that pinging green bikini in Carry On Camping (1969).
As part of Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, Windsor had announced herself in Lionel Bart’s Cockney musical, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (1959), and she went on to earn a Tony nomination for the Broadway transfer of Oh, What a Lovely War! (1965). Littlewood had urged her to drop out of the Carry Ons, and Windsor took 2 wilderness decades to emerge from their shadow. The talent was a